I admit that Shakespeare is not for everyone, for example my dad once left at half time during a performance of Romeo and Juliet at The Globe theatre because he wasn't enjoying it, but I was bemused as to what people were expecting when they purchased their tickets. Did they anticipate a modern day adaptation akin to Ten Things I Hate About You? Had the same people not seen Baz Luhrmann's take on Romeo and Juliet?
I could just imagine them all queuing at the box office complaining that they didn't know the new Voldermort movie would feature him speaking in tongues, and I don't mean Parseltongue.
This comes just a couple of weeks after cineastes got their knickers in a twist over the story that an Odeon in Liverpool issued refunds because customers did not realise multiple award-winning film The Artist, itself a tribute to the silent film era, didn't contain any dialogue.
After watching the trailer for Coriolanus, which glosses over the fact it is Shakespeare by featuring very little dialogue, perhaps some of the blame should be placed on the distributors who create these misleading trailer rather than naive, ignorant audiences who are the subject of abuse from bloggers.
Famously last year a woman in Detroit tried to sue the distributors of Drive after she claimed they tried to promote it as "very similar to Fast and the Furious" when in fact "it bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action movie... having very little driving in the motion picture".
Recently trailers for foreign language films Pan's Labyrinth, Heartbreaker, The Girl Who Played With Fire and Coco Before Chanel all used the dulcet tones of VoiceOver Man to describe the plot and music over dialogue to disguise the fact the film would be subtitled.
Three other examples include: The American starring George Clooney was criticised for having a trailer that advertised an exciting spy thriller when in reality the approach was much more European in its execution; US 'mumblecore' comic drama Cyrus was sadly promoted as a "hilarious" Judd Apatow style comedy because it starred Jonah Hill; and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street produced a trailer that promised Tim Burton's atypical gothic style but failed to mention that it was also a musical!
We can be quick to bemoan the state of the UK box office, complaining when filmmaking that is designed for the lowest common denominator like The Hangover Part 2 succeeds, whereas films like Margaret struggle to get distribution beyond a single screen in London. Yet how can people be expected to embrace films that are different and challenging, when the distributors don't even have the faith in their own product or the audiences to tell the truth, instead marketing them in the same generic fashion as everything else.
It seems that nowadays, in the same way you can't judge a book by its cover, you shouldn't judge a film by its trailer. After all, how many times have we watched an excellent trailer only for the film itself to be terrible? Just don't be too surprised if that film also has subtitles.
